Ashlyn's Radio Read online

  Not until she looked up and saw the girl crouched up beside a steel beam, staring back at her.

  “Holy shit!” Ashlyn’s hand flew to her chest, as though to quiet her suddenly racing heart. “You … you scared me.”

  “Yeah,” the girl snorted. “I have that effect on people.”

  Ashlyn squinted in recognition. “Hey, aren’t you….” Starts with an R. Rhonda? Rhoda? “Rachel,” she said, pleased to have retrieved the name.

  She’d seen this girl at school today, in the senior class. Ashlyn wasn’t particularly good with names, but this one she’d remembered, mainly because people had whispered about her. While Ashlyn had the new-kid distinction of getting a seat in the front, this girl had gravitated to a back corner of the classroom. Ashlyn had heard the snickers when Rachel walked in. And she did stick out. As hot as the day was, Rachel hadn’t come dressed for the stifling heat in the old school, which hadn’t yet discovered air-conditioning. While most of the kids showed up in short-sleeved shirts and shorts or jeans, this girl had walked in wearing a dark skirt that flowed way past her knees, thick stockings and well-scuffed, flat-bottomed shoes, and a long-sleeved black blouse buttoned high on the collar and right down to the wrists. Rachel’s brown hair fell halfway down her back. Between the hair and the clothes, she looked half hidden. And Ashlyn had the feeling she was quite all right with that. She’d heard the snicker-snorts of ‘witch-girl’ from a couple of the jocks when Rachel walked into class. But for some reason, Ashlyn had the feeling Rachel was good with this too, with everyone thinking this way. But Ashlyn knew damn well this girl wasn’t a witch. That wasn’t why she covered herself with those bizarre clothes.

  “You’re the new kid, Maudette Caverhill’s granddaughter,” Rachel said. “I’ve heard of you.”

  Ashlyn rolled her eyes. “You and everyone else. I’m Ashlyn Caverhill.”

  “I know.” With slow but sure steps, Rachel came down from her shadowed, steel-beam perch and stood beside Ashlyn, almost toe to toe. “I’m Rachel Riley. Bet you’ve heard of me too.”

  “I saw you at school today.”

  “Right. Of course you did.” She stared. She waited and scratched her head. “Um, this is the part where you turn and dash out of here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, yes, you’re excused,” Rachel said, waving her away with her hands.

  Ashlyn snorted. “That wasn’t an excuse me, I’m leaving. That was an excuse me, what the heck?” Ashlyn studied the other girl, genuinely curious. She didn’t look dangerous. Certainly not threatening. Rude? Oh, yeah. But in truth, that was almost refreshing.

  “I’m Rachel Riley,” she repeated, as though Ashlyn might be slow on the uptake. “You really don’t want to be seen with me.”

  Ashlyn shrugged. “We’re under the train bridge on a Tuesday afternoon. Who’s to see?”

  “That’s not the point. I’m the local loco.” She waved her hands along her attire as if that were all the proof needed. “I’m the weird girl. The witch.” Her mouth pulled back in a grimace and she sucked in a lungful of air.

  “You’re not going to cackle are you?” Ashlyn asked.

  Rachel coughed out the air she’d just sucked down. “Hell, no.”

  “Who says you’re a witch?”

  “Everyone,” Rachel answered. “Me. I’m strange. Got it? I’m a weirdo. Why else would I dress this way?”

  Ashlyn angled her head, studying Rachel. “Probably because you’re a cutter.”

  Rachel’s brown eyes saucered, and even in the dim light below the train bridge, Ashlyn could see the panic in them. The truth in them.

  Rachel stumbled over her words. “No-o. I’m just.” She wet her lips. “I’m … you know … different.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Get over yourself already.”

  Rachel blinked. “Pardon me?”

  “Different? God, where I come from, you can hardly be cool unless you are a cutter. You’re not different, Rachel. You’re normal. You just happen to be addicted to doing something really stupid.”

  “Whoa! Wait a minute, Metro-girl. I don’t—”

  “Hey, relax. It’s not like I’ll tell,” Ashlyn said. “I mean, who would I tell?”

  While Rachel didn’t exactly wilt with relief, her shoulders loosened a bit. They didn’t seem thrown back so very far.

  “For the record,” Ashlyn added, “there are other means to … vent. To handle the pressure.”

  Rachel bristled. “Ones that leave psychological scars instead of physical ones, you mean?”

  Ashlyn shrugged. “Everything leaves a scar of some kind.”

  Rachel turned away from her. She paced a few steps and took a seat by the fire pit.

  After a moment, Ashlyn joined her.

  It was Rachel who broke the silence.

  “You don’t know the pressure here,” she finally said. “Podunk Junction isn’t all moonbeams and roses and lemonade on front porches.”

  “Podunk Junction?” Ashlyn was surprised to hear the label she’d given the village coming from someone else. “Omigod, you’re not from around here either?”

  Rachel snorted. “I wish. I’ve lived here all my life.” She pushed a dark-toed shoe along the cement. “Which is just seventeen years too long.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I’m the proverbial square peg in this round-hole town. The odd man out. The—”

  “The witch?” Ashlyn said. “Isn’t that what you’re going for?” She hadn’t meant it come out so sarcastic.

  Rachel shook her head. “You don’t understand this place yet, Ashlyn Caverhill from Canada. You’re the newbie. The one who doesn’t have to keep the secrets and pretend not to hear the—”

  “The train?” Ashlyn interrupted.

  Rachel whirled to face her. “Trains … trains don’t run through the Junction anymore. Goddamn, it’s really a shame.”

  Gooseflesh prickled on Ashlyn’s bare arms and she ran her hands over them. Those were the words — the very words — that her grandmother had used. Over and over again

  “But I’ve heard a train at night. Quite a few times now.”

  “You couldn’t have,” she said, but her tone lacked conviction.

  “Couldn’t I?”

  Rachel ran a hand through her hair. She stared into the fire pit as deeply as if a fire burned there. When she looked up, her face was tight with … what? Fear?

  “Okay, so you heard it. I presume you know the drill, then? Stay in bed. As deep as you can under the covers.”

  “Why?”

  “Everyone does. Always.”

  God, that look on Rachel’s face. It was beyond fear. And in a lightning bolt of intuition, Ashlyn knew. She just knew. “That’s not what you do, is it?” Ashlyn said. “You don’t stay in bed at night.”

  “No. No, I don’t.” Rachel’s voice was so small and trembled out like a child’s. “I never, ever could.”

  Rachel’s bottom lip quivered just the tiniest bit as she sat there staring back. Ashlyn knew she wanted to tell. Oh, God, she needed to tell. She dug her fingers into her knees as she sat there.

  Suddenly, she startled. They both did as they heard the pounding above them.

  “Oh crap! That’s the Caldwell boys.” Rachel stood. “They always race each other home. School’s out. This place will be overrun in about ten minutes.”

  Ashlyn stood. “Tell me more about those trains I hear.”

  “Un-uh.” Rachel shook her head. “I’m outta here.”

  Two steps behind her, Ashlyn followed.

  Rachel stopped at the edge of the bridge, just before the steel beam the girls would swing themselves back up on. She turned to Ashlyn. “You should probably know, he’s a dick.”

  Ashlyn’s head shot back. “Who’s a dick?”

  “Mr. Maggs, our homeroom teacher. We’ll have detention for a week after skipping class.”

  “Got it covered.” Ashlyn grinned. “I’m going to play the confused-new-girl
card.”

  Rachel smiled for the first time since their encounter. She was pretty, Ashlyn thought, in a … well … witchy kind of way. “Yeah, and it’ll work just as well as my weird-girl one. I’ll see you in detention.”

  This wouldn’t be so bad. She kind of liked Rachel, the self-imposed witch. The self-described weirdo who’d spent seventeen years in Podunk Junction.

  And Rachel Riley knew about the trains.

  Chapter 2

  “DETENTION, HUH?”

  At her grandmother’s comment, Ashlyn shrugged. “An hour after school, for the rest of the week.”

  “So early in the year?”

  Ashlyn shrugged again, and then she waited. And waited.

  But the expected reaping-sowing/you’ll-learn-eventually lecture never came. The old woman merely shook her head and turned to the stove to stir the simmering chili.

  What the heck?

  Her grandmother was so strict about some things (that whole bizarre stay-in-bed thing, for instance), yet with other things, she seemed to be able to just let them slide. Things her mother would flip out over. Of course, maybe that had something to do with the fact that she and Maudette were practically strangers. In all her 17 years, Ashlyn had never once set foot in the Junction. That is, until she’d had no other choice. And her grandmother had been to Toronto all of twice in her life, and that was when Ashlyn had been very young. There were always gifts at Christmas, and never a birthday forgotten, but still they were practically strangers.

  Ashlyn knew her mother and grandmother talked on the phone every other week or so. From her mother’s side of the conversations, Ashlyn knew they talked about Maudette’s dogs, Ashlyn’s school, and Leslie’s job at the law firm. Normal-life kind of stuff. But sometimes … sometimes during the late night calls that Ashlyn wasn’t supposed to know about, her mother and Maudette would talk of other things. She couldn’t make out much of what was said through her mother’s angry sobs, but this much Ashlyn knew: there was something Leslie Caverhill had left unresolved from her own Podunk Junction days.

  Ashlyn noted that her grandmother had stopped stirring. Ack! She’d better scram before Maudette changed her mind and decided to say something about detention after all. With a quick, “Better get started on my homework,” she shouldered her bookbag again and raced up the stairs to her bedroom.

  Rachel Riley was the only other student gracing the detention room when Ashlyn walked in and handed over the telltale bright yellow slip to the teacher on duty. She sat down beside her.

  “I like your nail polish,” Ashlyn offered. And she did. It was a black so dark it almost looked hollow on Rachel’s close-trimmed fingernails.

  “Talking is strike one, Ms. Caverhill,” Mr. Berg, the detention supervisor said. “Do it again and you’ll earn an extra day in here.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. I just transferred from Toronto and I get confused—”

  “Save the lame excuses. Strike one. Now, no talking.”

  Save them? Why bother? They don’t seem to be working!

  The silence was complete. For about ten minutes.

  Then, with a stern look and word of warning to stay silent, Mr. Berg left Ashlyn and Rachel alone in the room while he stepped out into the hallway. From her desk, Ashlyn saw him go to stand beside a tight-sweatered woman she recognized as the librarian.

  “Berg’s hitting that,” Rachel said.

  “Really?” Ashlyn glanced at Rachel, then back to the two adults in the corridor. They looked pretty circumspect to her.

  “Fact number 1,” Rachel began. “We’re the only two here, and he let us sit beside each other in detention. The teachers here never — and I mean never — do that unless the room is full. So Berg’s got something on his mind. Fact number 2: He closed the door behind him when he left the room.”

  “Another no-no?”

  “Definitely. We hoodlums are not to be trusted.”

  “And from that you deduced that they’re hooking up?”

  “Well, that and the fact that I saw them making out in his car last night behind the old train station. Sometime around eleven.”

  Ashlyn’s jaw dropped down. “No way!”

  “Way. Did I mention he’s married?”

  Ashlyn shook her head. Partly to dislodge the blinking neon The Teacher and the Naughty Librarian porn marquee that was now flashing in her head, and partly because Rachel had just fessed up to being out and on the tracks at 11 o’clock at night.

  “I don’t know why that should surprise me, but it kind of does,” Ashlyn said. “Maybe because it’s such a quiet little town. Everyone seems so … sedate and orderly.”

  “You’d be surprised what goes on in this quiet little place.” Rachel looked away, down at her hands then out the window.

  Geez, Caverhill. You’ve only got one foot left, how about using it to kick yourself in the butt rather than sticking that one in your mouth too?

  “That’s the thing about small towns, everyone thinks they know everything about everybody else. People judge what they see on the outside — the straight laced, the quiet, the happy-go-lucky, the old farts down at the store who smile and call you young lady — and they think it’s the same behind closed doors as it is out in the open. Oh, Wally’s just so friendly or Mona’s as timid as a mouse. It just grows. It just … is in everyone’s mind. Well, Ashlyn Caverhill from Toronto, you’d be damned surprised what goes on behind those doors. Everybody thinks they know, but they don’t. Not really.”

  What did everyone think they knew about Rachel, the witch? Was that it? Was that all they saw? Was that all she wanted them to see? Rather than what?

  “Rachel,” Ashlyn said, “I’m the new kid here and….”

  “You’re the new kid who just earned another day of detention, Ms. Caverhill,” Berg said, striding back into the room. “No talking. I warned you.”

  “Doesn’t that just suck ass, Mr. Berg?” Rachel exclaimed. “Damned city folk!”

  “And that, Ms. Riley, just earned you another day keeping Ms. Caverhill company. Keep it up ladies. I’m here all term. You can be too.”

  Ashlyn held back a grin. While she wasn’t exactly aiming for an entire year of detention, she was okay with an extra day tacked on to the three Maggs had given her. Especially with Rachel there. She was fun. Strange, odd, definitely brazen. Yet there was a sadness there in Rachel too. And Ashlyn was determined to find out why.

  Figuring she might as well get a bit of homework in before supper, Ashlyn plunked herself down on the bed. Another squeaky protest from the old bedsprings. She had it pretty much figured out at night — how to adjust herself exactly in the middle on her left side, with her right knee up and her left leg straight. That was the surest no-squeak zone. Once settled in, the bed was comfortable enough, but it was old. As old as everything else in Maudette Caverhill’s little two-story house.

  Ashlyn was sleeping in what used to be her mother’s room. These were the same light green walls that had once surrounded Leslie. The solid desk and wooden chair in the corner had belonged to her mother many years ago. Ashlyn had to smile when she’d first explored it. PM & LC 4ever. Ashlyn herself had touched the PM a moment. Patrick Murphy had been her dad. Her grandmother must’ve had a fit when she’d found those initials carved deep into the wood. And Ashlyn wondered, as she so often had, how it was possible to miss someone so desperately she’d never even known.

  Though Maudette had converted to electric heat decades ago, a tin disk covered the hole in the wall where a stovepipe used to be. Had Ashlyn’s mother Leslie lain there in bed and looked at that unblinking tin eye? And when Ashlyn stepped from one small braided rug to another on her way back from the bathroom, she imagined her mother tiptoeing along the same stepping-stone path. And the butterfly-curtained, wide windows that overlooked the dogs’ kennels out back were the same ones that her mother must have stared out so many years ago into her own dark nights.

  It was this thought — the recurring mental picture of Leslie
Caverhill staring out the wide window — that made Ashlyn miss her mother the most. Though her mother was hospitalized just an hour away, Ashlyn hadn’t yet been able to visit. Leslie supposedly didn’t want her daughter to see her this way. The doctors had concurred. Well, Ashlyn didn’t concur. But apparently that didn’t count for much.

  Ashlyn unzipped her bookbag. She’d get the math out of the way. Mr. Maggs had assigned four pages. It was mostly review from last year, and she was familiar with all the concepts. The hardest thing would be working with the imperial system rather than metric. She’d deal. She’d get the math done before the fun stuff. They were studying Shakespeare this term. William-freakin’-Shakespeare! Othello no less! She’d practically jumped out of her seat when the English teacher handed out the texts. She kept her emotions under wraps, of course (and that delighted little squee way down inside). But there was something about lit – good lit – that flared Ashlyn’s passion. She loved it. She could curl right up inside it, go off to another world.

  She sighed. “Math first. Then Othello and Desdemona and—”

  Ashlyn’s eyes widened as she looked down at the bed and the little glass jar that rolled out of her unzipped bookbag. Nail polish. Half a bottle. So black it almost looked hollow as she closed her hand around it.

  Right away she unscrewed the cap and with a smile, started on a thumb.

  “So they say he’s a real dick now?”

  Ashlyn nearly dropped the bowl she was drying. The pot was still half-full of chili, so there were just a few dishes tonight. “Maudette!”

  “Stanley Maggs, I mean,” Maudette said. “Your teacher. Not that I blame him one bit for giving you detention for cutting class. But if he gives you a hard time about anything he shouldn’t … about us, you tell me. Right away. I’ve known Stanley since he was in diapers. There were six of those Maggs kids — five girls and then Stanley came along. They spoiled him rotten. If he gives you any trouble, Ashlyn, you let me know. I’ll deal with it.”

  “Thanks, Maudette.” Ashlyn felt her cheeks growing warmer. Not that she could ever picture herself calling on the old woman to come and fight her battles. But just the fact that she was willing to. God, it almost seemed like Maudette wanted to. That was … kind of cool.